Mary Dejevsky: Illusions that the anniversary of perestroika should dispel

[Mary Dejevsky is chief editorial writer and columnist at The Independent.]

It seems like only yesterday and, at the same time, like a hundred years. In fact, it is a quarter of a century since Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – and set in train the changes that brought the end of both the system and the country.

For many Russians, though, the accession of 54-year-old Gorbachev after a string of old and sick men is a muted, even bitter, anniversary. Celebrated throughout the Western world as a liberator, Gorbachev is widely reviled in his homeland for destroying Soviet power. Vladimir Putin only articulated what many of his compatriots also felt, when he described the Soviet Union's collapse as "one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century". It will take many years for that judgement to be revised across the great Eurasian land mass, if it ever is.

But it is not only the people of the once-feared Soviet Union who are labouring under an illusion about the legacy of Mikhail Gorbachev. So is Gorbachev himself and, for quite different reasons, the outside world where the last Soviet leader is still lionised and – rightly – protected.

In an article to commemorate this anniversary, Gorbachev allowed himself one of his periodic critiques of today's Russia. With Putin, unnamed, but clearly in his sights, he regretted what he saw as Russia's failure to embark on serious modernisation and the way the democratic process had, in his words, "lost momentum" or, "in more ways than one, been rolled back". He also suggested that the reform plans of Dmitry Medvedev, Putin's successor in the Kremlin, had stalled because he was scared of civil society.

Now you can agree or disagree with Gorbachev here: much remains to be played out. But there is less room for divergence on Gorbachev's view of his years in power. He still believes that he could have brought democracy to the Soviet Union, if only he had set about reforming the Communist Party sooner; if only misguided and malevolent individuals had not set out to thwart him; if only the coup-plotters of August 1991 had stayed their hand. Even 25 years on, Gorbachev maintains that evolutionary change, through his twin projects of glasnost and perestroika, was feasible and the Soviet Union could have stayed intact.

This is not quite how I remember it, as a witness to the country's death throes as a correspondent in Moscow. Gorbachev came across always as just one move behind history. There is no shame in that: would any leader have kept pace, given that communism throughout Europe was already dead and food shops throughout Russia were empty? Was it not rather that even incremental reform was too much for the system to bear?..